feedback from a prospective user

I had a custom php site running phpbb, and I’m designing a WP site to replace it. I was planning on using forum software that would integrate with WP and settled on bbpress as the only free (or inexpensive) option.

But now I’m planning on sticking with phpbb, even though it won’t integrate with WP like I want it to. I was willing to install a handful of plugins, but it looks like I’m going to need 20 or 30 plugins just to get some basic functionality for users and the admin. That’s even considering that my user base is not technically oriented and many phpbb features are unnecessary. My site has a single column layout with a header navigation, so the login and other widgets aren’t very useful for me. It looks like it’s possible to get bbpress set up the way I want with enough coding, but I guess I was just hoping for more of a plug and play solution to get my new site up and running with.

I hope you will keep developing bbpress to be a more complete solution.

Decisions, not OptionsWhen making decisions these are the users we consider first. A great example of this consideration is software options. Every time you give a user an option, you are asking them to make a decision. When a user doesn’t care or understand the option this ultimately leads to frustration. As developers we sometimes feel that providing options for everything is a good thing, you can never have too many choices, right? Ultimately these choices end up being technical ones, choices that the average end user has no interest in. It’s our duty as developers to make smart design decisions and avoid putting the weight of technical choices on our end users.